Let The Battle Lines Be Drawn

By Pat Albertson

There’s nothing to spoil a dinner experience like having a small child sitting at the same table…

Pat Albertson was one dad who saw his cooking efforts turn to custard.

Don’t let meal times be a battle! That’s what someone helpfully told us, and it seemed like good advice at the time. After all, there are plenty of other battles to fight in the tricky business of bringing up a family without adding another one.

However, if things keep going the way they are, I will be erecting barbed wire and gun emplacements around the table, and maybe even a searchlight tower for good measure.

Almost everyone looks back on the way their parents brought them up and finds a few things that they would like to do a bit differently.

As we all know most of those resolutions disappear within the first week of getting out of the hospital, but one that particularly stuck in my mind was the way Mum catered to our unbelievably fussy tastes at teatime. Dad, bless his heart, was never much of a cook but unfortunately he had very clear ideas as to what constituted a satisfactory meal.

Chicken and pasta were definitely off the menu, and it was a rare day when something green arrived on his plate (rarer still when it made its way past his taste buds). That made it hard for Mum to encourage us to eat our vegetables (amongst other things) when we could all see Dad’s eating habits.

To cope with this situation Mum used to cook what more or less amounted to three meals each evening, letting us pick and choose as we wanted. Those fussy eating habits stayed with me right through my teenage years and were only broken the hard way when I went flatting for the first time.

Since my devoted wife has become a full-time mum, my cooking skills have slipped a little, but the other day I decided that I would do the cooking for a change.

What better to have a go at than that great Kiwi favourite, macaroni cheese? The secret of great cooking, they say, is timing and I realised how rusty I was when tea was just going in the oven at the time we normally eat.

“Don’t be offended if they don t like it”, my wife advised, but I was determined to plough on through, confident in the knowledge that there must be very few people in the world who don’t like macaroni cheese.

After all there is nothing green in it! I know better than to serve my son up anything even remotely green. In fact, one time when he was not looking I hid a pea in his mashed potato in an effort to get at least one vegetable into him. To my amazement he sucked all the potato off and spat the pea back onto his plate, all the while with a huge grin on his face.

“Dinner’s ready”, I called from the kitchen, summoning them in from the lounge and the nth re-run of Thomas the Tank Engine. There was a deathly silence as my daughter looked at her meal in disgust, almost as if to ask what vile creature from beyond the grave had crawled its way up the table leg and settled down onto her plate.

Eventually she deigned to sniff the offending matter and announced to her father and to the world, I don’t like macaroni cheese; it smells awful! My son, to his credit, actually managed one mouthful which he promptly spat out in disgust. At least my wife ate all of hers, no doubt in an attempt to soothe my sorely damaged pride.

With the kids getting hungrier by the minute, I was faced with the decision as to whether I should stick to my guns or cave in and give them something else.

I braced myself for the inevitable conflict, but ultimately backed down and started slicing up a quick fruit platter which was gratefully received by all concerned. Even my daughter managed to find it in her heart to tell me how much she appreciated mandarins for tea.

It looks like any aspirations I might have had to break the little darlings fussy habits in one easy lesson are doomed to failure. Still, Rome wasn’t built in a day and anyway I can take some satisfaction that they will eventually have to change if they don‘t want to have some disastrous flatting experiences.

In the meantime, I think I will take that advice that was offered to me about meal times and battlefields after all.

Now where can I trade in the barbed wire and buy a white flag.

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